Tracing bloodlines in 'Stoker’s Manuscript'

A: Close to 15 years, ever since the first time a story came into my head. It was like, “What is this?” When it happens, it’s big. There’s no mistaking it. It’s a very profound experience.

Q: What kind of research did you do for this book?

A: I quickly wrote down a story synopsis and character sketches and I sent them off up to a professional editor. He suggested I read several recently released vampire stories (“The Historian,” by Elizabeth Kostova, and “Dracula: The Un-Dead,” by Dacre Stoker, the original author’s great-grandnephew) to make sure I wasn’t treading on any common ground. Fortunately, nothing was really common about them.

I went back about 25 years to something from (“Star Trek” creator) Gene Roddenberry. He said when it comes to science fiction, picture a river meandering through two lands. You’re over on one side and science fiction is on the other side. What you’re trying to do with science fiction is construct a bridge in such a way that when you are holding the reader’s hand and you are taking them across the bridge, by the time they ask, “Can this really happen?” then they are already on the other side and you are free to roam in science fiction land. You have them.

Q: So what bridge did you have to build?

A: Bram Stoker already built that bridge. He created the vampires so you’re not selling a brand new character. But I really felt it necessary to reinforce that bridge, to bring it up to code if you will, because it was built in the 1890s.

I wanted to explain through modern science and understanding what these creatures are and further what they’re not. For me, shape-shifting by vampires never works. That’s just my taste. Flying, that doesn’t work, either. Moving very quickly and being pumped up on adrenaline? That kind of works for me.

Q: Did you travel to Transylvania?

A: I went there exactly as many times as Bram Stoker did. Which is zero.

Q: When you started on this, were you worried about vampires being overdone?

A: No. The current genre that includes romance was certainly nothing that I was going to go up against. I never saw vampires as warm and fuzzy romantic creatures. I always envisioned them as sinister creatures of the night, encounters with which are always going to end badly for the humans.